Q&A

How does this feel? “There were a few sleepless nights, but to get to the finish in first and third and Elfyn’s pace was great with his fastest times… I would definitely have taken this. The car’s good. And so are the drivers...”

What was Ogier’s feedback?

“We have a long list of little things that he wants. We’re working on these as fast as we can, we’re working to make him happy. But, from the moment he got in the car for the first time, he was happy. That was what gave us the confidence, but since then he’s just had no time in the car. We had the odd thing on the test and came out of there saying: ‘We think we’re OK, we think the car’s OK, but the driver’s just not had enough time…’” How much can you gain from those changes he wants? “There’s more performance to come from the car, but as well as that, Seb will get more used to us and we’ll get more used to him. Everybody’s learning now and everybody will be improving, what it becomes now is a race to see which team can get these new cars acclimatised to the rallies the fastest. I think we’ll be on for some more wins in the rest of the year. This has given us confidence, it’s a great start and let’s see what comes.”

Will you need jokers to make any changes? “No. It’s not on that side, it’s more on the set-up and small changes in that area.”

You had some reliability issues though… “Coming into the event, we’d been fighting some small problems, not car stoppers, but these things cost performance. We came to the event knowing we had done the best job we could do and we hoped we could maintain the reliability. Like Tanak showed, it’s never perfect. The part which we had the issue with on Ott’s car, we’d never had any issues with.”